SEMrush Review: How We Increased Organic Search Traffic by 532%

An informed ecommerce business owner is a better business owner because they’re able to base their decisions on facts and data rather than speculation and theories. To help you base your business decisions on facts and data, this SEMrush review will break down each of SEMrush’s many tools in detail to show you what kind of data and facts are available for you to analyze, not only on your own website but your competitor’s as well.

Don’t make the mistake of basing your business decisions on anecdotal evidence; make sure you’re getting the facts. SEMrush can provide you with a plethora of valuable information to help you get those facts whether it’s in regards to keywords, backlinks, ad campaigns, website traffic, SEO, social media and much more so you can get concrete evidence on both the performance of your own website and your competitor’s websites so you can make the best decisions for your business.

Let’s dive into what SEMrush can do for your business (and what it’s done for ours).

Bonus: SEMrush now offers comprehensive training for their platform through their free online course which can be found here.

SEMrush Review: What SEMrush Does

SEMrush is an online marketing research service that helps ecommerce entrepreneurs and website owners understand how their competitors have created marketing opportunities so they can make use of them as well. They believe that there’s no reason to make your own mistakes when it comes to online marketing when you can learn from your competitor’s successes and benefit from them instead.

SEMrush has created many powerful tools to help ecommerce entrepreneurs improve their marketing efforts whether it’s SEO, PPC, ad campaigns, content marketing, backlinks, keyword research and implementation, SERP, social media and much more so you can truly understand the data and analytics behind your own website, compare it to your competitors and then find opportunities for improvement and helpful ways to make those improvements.

SEMrush is not for the new entrepreneur looking to start up their first ecommerce business – it’s for the entrepreneur looking to grow their reach, boost their traffic and get more from their efforts.

While SEMrush is a comprehensive SEO toolkit with an extensive feature set (which we will discuss more later in this post), in short, here’s some of the standout things SEMrush can help you accomplish:

Find out who your competitors are and the top competitors in your niche

Learn exactly what keywords to use for your own products, pages, and blog posts

SEMrush Review: Who SEMrush is For

SEMrush is for the entrepreneur who’s ready to grow their business to new heights and really wants to dig in and do the dirty work when it comes to reports, analytics, data and tracking. SEMrush will provide you with the facts but it’s up to you to implement their suggestions and take action on your own website.

SEMrush is also for the entrepreneur who’s ready to compete in their industry and take their strategies to the next step. It’s for the entrepreneur who’s ready to get in on the game for real and the entrepreneur who’s ready to perform.

Our Results of Using SEMrush for One Year

We’ve been using SEMrush here at A Better Lemonade Stand for several years now. In particular, we were highly focus on SEO growth in 2015 and used SEMrush religiously to uncover great keywords to target. Over the course of that year, we were able to explode our readership, achieving 532% growth that year. This set the stage for the rest of our business and was instrumental in our overall success as a business.

Why is SEMrush So Effective?

For most websites, stores, and blogs, the majority of traffic (80%) comes from a handful of pages (20%). This is a perfect example of the Pareto Principle at play.

By knowing exactly what your competitors top ranking pages are, and the keywords those pages are ranking for, you can be exponentially more efficient with your time by creating and optimizing your content based on those keywords.

SEMrush Review: Walkthrough

In the video below, you’ll learn the basics of SEMrush, as well as a real example of how a smaller ecommerce brand can use the tool to get uncover keywords and potentially lucrative products ideas from rival competitors.

Check out the following descriptions for an overview of each tool and click on the link to learn more about it.

SEMrush’s Analytics Reports

With SEMrush’s Analytics Reports you can get insights into your competitor’s strategies whether it be their display advertising, organic and paid search or their link building. These are the following Analytics Reports that SEMrush provides:

Organic Research

Boost your own Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) by targeting your competitor’s keywords and compete for the top spot. With SEMrush’s Organic Research Reports you can see what your competitor’s best keywords are so you can go after them yourself, discover new organic competitors you may not have otherwise been aware of and observe position ranking changes for different domains.

Advertising Research

With SEMrush’s Advertising Research feature you can improve your advertising campaigns by getting a glimpse into your competitor’s. Find out how your competitors are making the most out of their PPC investments by analyzing their Adwords, viewing their traffic, their volume and their CPC estimations for every keyword and all the while discover how you can improve your PPC bidding system and efficiency and reduce your advertising budget.

With this feature you’ll also be able to see whether your competitors are using high-volume or long-tail keywords to achieve their rankings, whether they promote their services with branded ad copies or whether they use branded keywords to boost their conversions. You’ll also get information that details how long your competitor’s ads have been running, which is valuable information you can use to learn whether their ads were successful or not based on how long they were running, or if they run seasonal ads around specific times of the year.

Display Advertising

Google’s Display Network plays a huge role in search advertising and with SEMrush’s Display Advertising feature you’re able to analyze how other companies create successful display ads. You can do this by analyzing industry leader’s or competitor’s ad headlines, images, calls to action and more, plus you can view the amount of ad impressions and the ad’s ability to generate conversions. Finally, you can compare between text advertisements and media banners to see which works the most successfully for advertisers.

To help you hone in on your target market even more, SEMrush’s Display Advertising feature provides a SEMrush Adsense Publisher’s Report which can help you discover the websites your competitors are advertising on so you can find websites you have not used yet to promote your business that can potentially be ideal advertising locations.

Backlinks

With SEMrush’s Backlinks Reports you get thorough information in regards to the rank, authority and geolocation of the incoming links to your website. These links are a vote for your website’s releancy, trustworthiness and credibility and they’re also one of the most important factors that play into your SEO and SERP.

With this feature you’re able to check incoming links for a URL, domain or root domain, you can discover the domain authority and geolocation, see the anchor text that the link is attached to, view the URLs and titles of linking and target webpages, and also compare the incoming link’s weight on the competitor’s domain.

This backlink checker is an advantageous tool to use to help you improve your backlink building strategy because it’s an efficient way to monitor and view new referral traffic sources so you’re always aware of where they’re coming from.

Keyword Research

We’ve discussed the importance of keyword research before in our Ultimate Guide to Keyword Research, so it’s no surprise that SEMrush provides a tool to help you find the best high-volume and long-tail keywords for your content and website.

With SEMrush’s keyword research tool you can search for high ranking and search engine optimized keywords, get information on each keyword’s value for organic and paid research such as CPC, volume, number of results, ad copies and more, you’ll get information on the top ranking domains for each keyword and also be able to analyze keywords for desktop and mobile performance.

Keywords are such an important part of SEO and building a strong web presence for ecommerce businesses and websites alike, and the SEMrush Keyword Research tool helps you dig deeper into keyword data and analytics so you can make the best decisions for your business.

Product Listing Ads

Using SEMrush’s Product Listing Ads Reports you can define your Google Shopping competitors, discover the Product Listing Ads keywords that you and your competitors have in common, view the keywords that rank your competitor’s Product Listing Ads to appear in paid search results and more.

By having access to this information about your competitor’s Product Listing Ads you’ll be able to refine your Google Shopping strategy and become a more competitive contender for you and your competition’s target audience.

SEMrush’s Tools

SEMrush’s Tools provide you with the data to compare competitive domains and estimate keyword difficulty so you can make precise decisions for your business’ SEO strategy.

Keyword Difficulty

SEMrush’s Keyword Difficulty Tools helps you to predict the possibility you’ll be able to rank for any given keyword based on a number system and a system that ranks keywords on a scale ranging from easy to hard.

Each keyword you search for on SEMrush will have a Keyword Difficulty colored number alongside the relevant data so you can make the decision whether it’s worth the effort to target. By using this tool you can find keywords with low competition (the green colored keywords) or at least understand in advance when a keyword will be difficult to rank for (orange or red colored keywords) so you can prepare in advance.

Domain vs. Domain

Use SEMrush’s Domain vs. Domain tool to get a visual overview of up to 5 domains per attempt so you can compare and contrast the data. This tool helps you to conduct a competitive analysis easily and efficiently and gives you an overview of the competitive landscape using the Venn algorithm so you can view diagrams of you and your competitor’s keyword relationships.

This tool makes data mining and big data analysis more time friendly and approachable so you can independently monitor this information without having to outsource to a professional team.

Charts

Get a glimpse into how many visitors land on your competitor’s website, the amount of traffic your competitor’s drive to their site via paid searches, get estimate amounts of how much your competitor’s spend on Google Adwords, their top ranking keywords for search results as well as their lost and declining keywords that are no longer ranking them in the top search engine spots.

My Reports

Share all the data you learn on SEMrush in a beautifully formatted PDF document so you can keep your coworkers, superiors, clients or investors in the know.

With SEMrush’s My Reports tool you’re able to create custom reports with your business’ branding, add comments and annotations to clarify your findings, structure your reports the way you want them, create pre-designed templates so anyone on your team can create a report as well and schedule reports to go out on a regular basis.

Keyword Magic Tool

Don’t get stuck going after the same keywords, branch out to other relevant keywords that fit your business’ targets which can help you achieve more successful content rankings and marketing campaigns.

SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool enables you to find over 2 million keywords to choose from after entering one “seed” keyword. You can then sort the results by search volume, ranking difficulty, competitiveness, CPC data and more in one easy to read table. These results are related to the seed keyword you entered and you’re able to further narrow down the results by search topic so you can really hone in on the keywords that are most relevant to you.

This tool helps you to find long-tail keywords that are applicable to your business so you can create more opportunities to target those keywords in your content, copy, advertising campaigns and just to boost your overall Search Engine Ranking Position. You can also compile all of the best keywords the Keyword Magic Tool helps you find into one list that you can easily reference later so you have all the necessary data at hand when you need to use it.

SEMrush’s Projects

Position Tracking

Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) is important, especially if you work hard at optimizing your content, product pages and website for SEO, so make use of SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool to monitor your national, regional and local search engine positions for any keyword.

This data is updated daily so you’ll always have accurate information in regards to where you’re ranking for your target keywords at all times. With this tool you’ll be able to see your SEO efforts pay off, be updated when your webpages change SERP and you can even keep track of your competitor’s keyword rankings so you know how you compare.

Since you can narrow down your position tracking to the local level you can get a microscopic view of your SERPs which is especially ideal if you service a specific area of the world.

By conducting the Site Audit you’ll make your website more approachable to search engines such as Google which will improve your search engine rankings as well as improve the website experience for your visitors in general.

Some of the aspects of your SEO the SEMrush Site Audit helps fix includes optimizing internal and external links, adding missing tags, improving titles and meta descriptions, editing broken images and much more.

Social Media Tracker

Social media is a huge part of many successful businesses and the Social Media Tracker tool will help you make the most out of your social media strategy. See your competitor’s top performing posts so you can understand what they did correctly to engage their followers, compare your engagement with your competitor’s engagement to see how you measure up and keep an eye on their engagement no matter which platforms their on.

You can even build PDF reports detailing your social media progress so you can share your results with coworkers, superiors or clients to make sure everyone’s on the same page.

Social Media Poster

There are many tools that offer automated social media posting services, however, with SEMrush you won’t need a separate tool to do all that for you! Simply use their Social Media Poster to schedule and manage Facebook and Twitter posts from one place so you can save time and always have content organized and ready to go.

You can even analyze your posts’ engagement and performance from this tool so you don’t need to constantly be checking your social platforms for updates. Save time and view it all right in the tool itself.

Brand Monitoring

When your brand gets mentioned by other brands or customers on social media, blogs or just on the web in general, it can have a hugely positive effect on your brand’s image as well as your SEO in some cases.

Stay in-the-know of who’s mentioning you and whether what they’re saying is positive, neutral or negative and use the relevant data that SEMrush keeps track of to know whether any mentions are worth following up on and partnering with the mentioner.

You can even keep tabs on your competitor’s mentions so you can target them for yourself and possibly find new channels for distributing your brand.

On-Page SEO Checker

Google’s algorithm is constantly changing so make sure you’re up to date with everything by using SEMrush’s On-Page SEO Checker tool. This tool allows you to check whether you’re meeting Google’s on-page and off-page SEO requirements such as your content, backlink and optimization quality and it will even offer specific changes you can make to improve your on-page SEO.

This tool provides you with a detailed analysis report that suggests related words and phrases you can add to your content to make it even more keyword dense, areas of your content you can add additional backlinks to, your content’s length in comparison to your competitor’s and your keyword usage compared to your competitor’s as well.

Backlink Audit Tool

This is an important tool to help you maintain upkeep on the sites that are linking back to yours. In order to maintain a healthy SEO status with search engines such as Google you want to make sure that the backlinks you’re receiving come from reputable sources. To learn more about backlinks, what they are and how to acquire them check out our article on How to Get Backlinks.

Although you may be attempting to acquire backlinks from reputable sources, you ultimately can’t control the sites that link back to you and some of those sites you may not want to be affiliated with. In order to protect your site from being penalized by Google for being affiliated with non-reputable sites, use SEMrush’s Backlink Audit tool to check where your backlinks are coming from.

With this tool you’ll be able to find all your backlinks via the Search Console integration, discover and remove any bad backlinks, report backlinks to Google’s Disavow tool and keep your backlink record clean and full of only the sites you want to be affiliated with.

Organic Traffic Insights

With this tool you get access to a list of keywords that each of your web pages is indexed for with which you’ll be able to see the search volume it’s bringing in, your ranking position and the amount of traffic it brings in.

You’ll also be able to consolidate your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data in one place so you can easily view all your data and discover which keywords drive traffic to which URL and which ones also drive conversions.

Content Analyzer

Dive deep into the analytics of your content so you can better understand how it’s performing and how your audience is engaging with it. This is an ideal tool to view important metrics such as visitor sessions, durations and bounce rate as well as social shares and backlinks to the content in particular.

You can also compare posts against one another and even get suggestions on how to better optimize your content for search engines.

PPC Keyword Tool

This tool is specifically designed to help you create the most successful PPC campaigns by helping you build the perfect list of keywords. Obtain your keywords from various sources, narrow down your keyword list, remove duplicates with one click, get rid of keywords that cause your ads to compete against each other and even use the suggested recommendations to further narrow down your list of keywords to the best and most relevant words.

Cons:

Some of the data, suggestions and results that SEMrush provides is based on educated estimations as some of the SEO data they examine is based on speculated information.

SEMrush is not a particularly beginner friendly tool, it’s helpful to have some experience in SEO, SERP, SEM, PPC campaigns, ad campaigns, etc. to use it

SEMrush’s Pricing

SEMrush offers 3 pricing plans which can be billed monthly or annually. The monthly plans are priced as follows:

Pro: $99.95 USD /month

Guru: $199.95 USD /month

Business: $399.95 USD /month

Each plan offers different amounts of analytic reports, projects, reportings, users and more, so for a break down of what each plan entails check out their pricing page directly.

Conclusion

SEMrush is not a tool for the new entrepreneur, the services they offer are powerful, robust, comprehensive and informative. They have every tool a seasoned entrepreneur needs to dive deep into the guts of their business whether it’s their SEO strategy, backlinks, content performance, social media engagement, brand mentions, keywords, domain authority, advertising campaign optimization and much, much more.

If your business is weak in any or a few of these areas SEMrush’s tools can help you get a detailed and raw look at where your problems may lie so you can adjust your course of action, improve your strategy and make better decisions for the future of your business.